This question is fairly representative of reader comments over the last few weeks:
Justin, please answer the one question that all the commenters here have been asking for weeks now. What is your plan to deal with the millions of illegal immigrants who are already here? Deportation? Self-deportation? Status quo?
I favor what is roughly the middle-ground approach for House Republicans: unauthorized immigrants must come forward, plead guilty to any immigration crimes they have committed, pay back taxes (although as most are low-skilled, this will be relatively negligible) and fines, and wait a decade before getting a green card.
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This immigration bill will pass the Senate. I'm quite confident a similar one will pass the House. I will be surprised if President Obama hasn't signed immigration reform into law before the first of the year. This is happening whether I like it or not, so the most important concerns are to limit the negative effects on the native born working class, do our best to tighten up the enforcement provisions, and push back against a bipartisan effort to treat America's borders like an inconvenience rather than an important part of being a nation-state.
What worries me most about this immigration reform is that we'll get all the bad - an amnesty for 11 million unauthorized immigrants and a massive and permanently growing guest worker program to attack the wage floor for low-skilled American workers - with none of the good, as civil libertarian and "pro-business" groups will doggedly work to remove the enforcement provisions via the courts. If that happens, we'll be at a status quo that is even worse than today.
I don't think that is an inevitable result, and it's certainly not something worth cheering if, like me, your goal is to attempt to simultaneously preserve an America of relatively limited government and to combat inequality that is reaching levels that ought concern even the most committed conservatives.
This immigration bill will exacerbate problems faced by our least politically powerful citizens, and it's become something of a pet project to say that again and again and again. I don't really think anyone who matters is listening, but I've droned on because American workers deserve better than they're getting from their elites.
But as I've broadly made my thoughts known on the subject, I'm now attempting to switch over to reporting the immigration bills as news instead of opinion. (After all, do any of you really care about what an upper-middle class white protestant kid from the Great Plains thinks about political issues?) But I digress.
You know what I think. Now I'll try to deliver the facts - and let them speak for themselves.
Update: just in case you don't get my point, I'm saying I accept amnesty.
